FA: The return of Spheres of influence – Yalta-2

Trump, Putin and Xi against the backdrop of the Palace in Yalta, where the USSR, USA and Britain leaders meeting took place in February, 1945.
Photo: publics

Will negotiations over Ukraine be a new Yalta conference that carves up the World? – ‘The Foreign Affairs’ puts a question.

The Ukrainian war forced Europe to consider its dependence on the United States and required U.S. leaders to reassess their appetite for foreign commitments. It ushered China into a new role as Russia’s backer and made countries thousands of miles away grapple with essential questions about their futures: How should they balance partnerships with large, warring powers? What material and moral stances taken now will seem prudent decades down the line?

During the two decades that followed the Cold War, many of these questions seemed less central. The collapse of the Soviet Union greatly reduced the West’s fear of another world war — a fear that had led Western leaders to tolerate Soviet spheres of influence in central and eastern Europe. Many political leaders and analysts hoped that multilateralism and new efforts toward collective security would diminish the relevance of zero-sum geopolitical rivalries for good.

But after the 2008-9 global financial crisis took a toll on Western economies, Putin consolidated power in Russia, and China’s global influence rapidly expanded, geopolitics swiftly began to revert to a more ancient, hard power-based dynamic. Larger countries are again using their advantages in military force, economic leverage, and diplomacy to secure spheres of influence — that is, geographic areas over which a state exerts economic, military, and political control without necessarily exercising formal sovereignty.

Even though another world war is not yet on the horizon, today’s geopolitical landscape particularly resembles the close of World War II, when U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sought to divide Europe into spheres of influence. Today’s major powers are seeking to negotiate a new global order primarily with each other, much as Allied leaders did when they redrew the world map at the Yalta negotiations in 1945. Such negotiations need not take place at a formal conference.

If Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Chinese President Xi Jinping were to reach an informal consensus that power matters more than ideological differences, they would be echoing Yalta by determining the sovereignty and future of nearby neighbors.

In such a world, multilateral institutions such as NATO and the EU would be sidelined and the autonomy of smaller nations threatened.

It is no accident that over the past two decades, the nations now driving the return of power politics — China, Russia, and the United States — have all been led by figures who embrace a “make our country great again” narrative.

Commanding and extending spheres of influence appears to restore a fading sense of grandeur. For China, Taiwan alone will not suffice. For Russia, Ukraine can never be adequate to fulfill Putin’s vision of Russia’s rightful place in the world. The United States begins to look toward annexing Canada.

Another trajectory remains possible, one in which the EU and NATO adapt rather than wither. In such a scenario, they could continue to serve as counterbalances to U.S., Russian, and Chinese efforts to use hard power to achieve narrow state interests, threatening the world’s peace, security, and prosperity in the process. But those potential counterbalancing forces will have to fight for such an alternative — and take advantage of the obstacles that a more globalized world poses to great powers’ wish to carve it into pieces.

The term “sphere of influence” first cropped up at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, during which European colonial empires formalized rules to carve up Africa.

In truth, power politics had begun to resurface well before Russia invaded Ukraine. NATO’s U.S.-led intervention in Kosovo in 1999 (which particularly incensed Putin) and the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq (over the objections of close U.S. allies) both suggested that the leaders of the supposed new era of collective security still believed that when a strong state does not get its way, it is acceptable to escalate militarily.

More recently, the United States and China have been locked in a struggle for global technological and economic dominance, with Washington imposing sanctions on Chinese tech giants while Beijing invests heavily in alternative supply chains and its massive Belt and Road Initiative. China has also militarized the South China Sea and has pursued expansive and legally disputed territorial claims. The United States and its allies, meanwhile, have increasingly used financial sanctions as tools to constrain adversaries.

Russia, for its part, has continued to innovate brilliantly from a position of material weakness.

It is clear from Putin’s many recent speeches that he had never really abandoned an understanding of geopolitics that rested on spheres of influence and always struggled to understand why NATO should continue to exist, much less to expand. If the alliance’s purpose had been to defend the West against the Soviets, after the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO’s expansion effectively made the entirety of Europe — and particularly the former Warsaw Pact states — an American sphere of influence. For Putin, this was an unacceptable outcome.

The Ukraine war — and the settlement terms that now appear to be emerging — mark an even more pronounced return to nineteenth century–style geopolitics in which great powers dictate terms to weaker states.

Establishing spheres of influence involves a dominant power abridging the sovereignty of geographically proximate states—as Trump is seeking to do with Canada, Greenland, and Mexico and as China is attempting with Taiwan. A political order based on spheres of influence also relies on other great powers’ tacit agreement not to interfere in each other’s spheres.

Even if Trump and Putin move toward a more cooperative relationship with Xi, that could leave European states to fend for themselves. Countries such as Germany and France may be forced to develop independent security strategies. Eastern European states, particularly Poland and the Baltics, would likely push for greater defense commitments that their fellow European states may be unable or unwilling to provide. That outcome would also undermine the strategic importance of U.S. allies in Asia, forcing them to seek alternative defense arrangements — or even nuclearization.

The European Union could be moved to evolve into a sovereign federal state more closely resembling the United States. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom each remain capable middle powers, and France and the United Kingdom have their own nuclear deterrent, but together — and perhaps only together—a united Europe would have significantly less to fear from China, Russia, and the United States both militarily and economically.

The reemergence of spheres of influence signals that the nature of the global order is being tested. This shift could lead to a transition back to the power politics of earlier eras.

For the time being the United States is no longer serving as a reliable stabilizer. Where Washington, until recently, was considered the primary check on regionally expansionist regimes, it now appears to be encouraging those same regimes, and even imitating them. Whether this transition ultimately returns to a predictable balance of power or inaugurates a prolonged period of instability and war will depend on how effectively spheres of influence are contested — and how far countries such as China, India, Iran, Russia, and the United States are willing to go to secure them.

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